Plans

I guess I should start by outlining all my planned travel. For all those who don't know, I am an Australian PhD student working on a project in Experimental Particle Physics, specifically, on the ATLAS experiment, which is based in Geneva. I will probably be giving an overview of the experiment and my work in a later post.

Since the experiment is based in Geneva, and I am based in Australia, it is hard to to keep up to date with what's going on, and to collaborate with the other scientists. Personally, I find it easy to to lose motivation being so isolated, and I hate the time difference. I hate waiting ages for replies to emails, and I hate the having meeting times outside work hours, sometimes in the middle of the night.

Anyway, my research group has a grant which allows us to travel to and from the experiments which we are involved in. I used this funding last year to spend three months in Geneva over the European summer. This time, I have the funding to be over there for a year. It should be pretty exicting with the LHC starting up and all, but I'm going to miss my boyfriend, family and friends, and I'm going to miss my home and Melbourne. More often than not, I feel as if I don't want to go.

So why am I going if I don't really want to? Well, I know it's better for my academic carreer. My work and I get much more exposure if I am over there in person, rather than over here in the phone or video conference. It's also a great opporunity. I will get to witness the starting up of possibly the last large circular particle collider, and if I'm really lucky and work hard, I could be in the detector control room watching that first data getting recorded.

My supervisor has organised the timing quite well really. I will fly over on the 4th of July, then attend the week long collaboration conference in Bern, then start working at CERN. At around the same time they should be commissioning the proton beams for possible collision in August, while I'm working my arse off rewriting the ATLAS Level 2 Trigger. Though I have planned to take a couple of days off to meet up with some people in Dublin (from the 24th to the 28th of July) which should be great. Ireland sounds like a pretty cool place to visit.

So I'll be working hard for a month, then I fly to Chicago, USA on the 11th of August for a Hadron Collider Physics summer school at Fermilab. I'm quite excited about this actually, I get to see Fermilab while it still has some funding and the Tevatron while it is still in operation. Not to mention, the program of the school is really aimed at experimental particles physicists working on hadron colliders, which I am. I just hope it's not all going to be above my head. I hope they recommend some prereading for it. It has been a while since I had to study anything.

And since I'm going to be in that part of the world, I'm going to fly over to LA for a couple of days (from the 22nd to the 27th of August) to visit my relatives and friends from exchange, which should be a nice break.

Then I'm back in Geneva until December the 19th, when I will come home to visit my boyfriend and family, though it's going ot be a short trip and I'll be leaving again for Europe on the 5th of January.

So that's all the flying I have planned so far. I'm sure there will be more sightseeing in Europe while I am over there, but that'll all I have definite dates for. Not bad huh? *smiles*